Collectors, the parent company of PSA is set to acquire SGC according to Sports Business Reporter Darren Rovell, [1]
Note, the market breakdown above is for sports cards, not Pokemon.
Also,
Both brands will live separately [2]
Note, the market breakdown above is for sports cards, not Pokemon.
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You’re telling me HGA has 1% of the market?
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I wonder what would be the motivation.
Getting more grader ?
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SGC will outsell CGC once it is PSA
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Vintage baseball is definitely one big reason.
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Yeah SGC has a good vintage baseball following. I’ve seen more and more Pokemon slabs from them as well lately. Interesting move
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I thought psa, beckett, and cgc were around the same % of market, dang. Ig it makes sense idk tho, cuz i dont grade. its a waste of money. especially when i dont plan to sell my cards.
@tokyopokemon Would you like to submit to PSA or PSA?
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Was really hoping i could send in my junk looking sgc slabs for a nicer psa one in the future. Oh well, now to go watch e4 topics reddit posts about the grading conspiracies how psa10 is limited while sgc is overgrading.
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I use both. Would rather SGC just keep the grading fees the same. Then it does not matter, lower end cards to SGC and long term to PSA.
Same . raw is 90% + of my sales.
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I bought my first SGC slab recently. My God is it one of the worst slabs I’ve ever seen. Just really cheap looking
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My first thought is along the lines of what smpratte said in a video a few years ago, something like ‘if any grading company starts doing something right, they’ll just be acquired’. PSA seem to like what SGC were doing in the sports market. It’ll be interesting to see what, if any, changes happen to the sgc company & slab.
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This has got to be the only industry in the world where monopolies are encouraged and there is no regulation against it sheesh lol
Fanatics and PSA own the entire vertical in sports cards.
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You’ve said this before but I’ve never seen anyone encourage a monopoly.
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I agree, and while psa is the market leader its far from a monopoly. Multiple options in the US and abroad allow anyone who doesn’t want a psa slab to have their pick of the litter. Not to mention nothing is stopping a new competitor from buying the equipment and starting their own grading service.
PSA is slow as snot when it comes to grading vintage sports cards so I could see them offload a lot of their work in that department to SGC as it seems PSA is primarily interested in grading easy cards (modern sports and TCG), while SGC currently does a good job with vintage sports.
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At e3con last week SGC had on site grading. Nobody was there all day Sunday so idk. Maybe PSA got a steal like everyone else is getting on graded slabs rn lol
I would say the problem is when these companies start owning the whole stack. Grading, auction house, vault, card printing, etc. It sets up some weird incentives for what should be a “third-party” grader.
Only a couple more consolidations between eBay, Fanatics or Collectors and things start becoming a serious monopoly.
I wouldn’t say it’s encouraged, but rather it doesn’t seem to be discouraged. I also don’t think it’s unique to this market at all.
The problem isn’t that you can’t open up a new grading company or that you don’t have other options, it’s that a large enough monopoly power makes the field uncompetitive. In the same way I can make a search engine or use something other than Google search, but Google makes it internationally hard to do so in many ways that go beyond simply how good of a product it is.
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